It's not
about being liberal or conservative anymore y'all. That is a hype offered by the fascist whores who want to confuse the people with lies while they turn this country into an aristocratic police state. Some people will say anything to attain power and money. There is no such thing as the Liberal Media, but the Corporate media is very real.

Click here for a slide show of recent economic trends and unemployment from the perspective of the last 12+ years.

Here's the "official" unemployment rate (it's probably more than 20%) over time compared to all the past recessions starting in 1948.

Wednesday, 6 May 2020 at 18h 33m 11s

The latest reliable information on the disease COVID-19

This comes from autopsy findings of deceased COVID-19 patients.

What Doctors Are Learning From Autopsy Findings of Coronavirus (COVID-19) Patients

Once the SARS-CoV-2 virus is deeply embedded in the body, it begins to cause more severe disease. This is where direct attack on other organs that have ACE2 receptors can occur, including heart muscle, kidneys, blood vessels, liver, and the brain. Early findings, including those from multiple autopsy and biopsy reports, show that viral particles can be found not only in the nasal passages and throat, but also in tears, stool, kidneys, liver, pancreas, and heart. One case report found evidence of viral particles in the CSF, meaning the fluid around the brain. That patient had meningitis.

So the virus is sometimes going to all these different organs by means of attaching to the ACE2 receptors that are there, but thatís not even the whole story.

Because in some cases, by the time the bodyís immune system figures out the body is being invaded, its like unleashing the military to stomp out the virus, and in that process, thereís a ton of collateral damage. This, is what we refer to as the cytokine storm. When the virus gets into the alveolar cells, meaning the tiny little air sacs within the lungs, it makes a ton of copies of itself, and goes onto invade more cells. The alveoliís next door neighbor is guess who, yeah, the tiniest blood vessels in our body, capillaries. And the lining of those capillaries is called endothelium, which also have ACE2 receptors. And once the virus invades the capillaries. It means that it serves as the trigger for the onslaught of inflammation AND clotting. And Early autopsy results are also showing widely scattered clots in multiple organs. In one study from the Netherlands, 1/3rd of hospitalized with COVID-19 got clots despite already being on prophylactic doses of blood thinners. So not only are you getting the inflammation with the cytokine storm, but youíre also forming blood clots, that can travel to other parts of the body, and cause major blockages, effectively damaging those organs.

So wait a minute doc, youíre telling me that this can cause organ damage by
1) Directly attacking organs by their ACE2 receptor? Yup
2) Indirectly attacking organs by way of collateral damage from the cytokine storm? Yup
3) Indirectly cause damage to organs by means of blood clots? yup
4) Indirectly casue damage as a result of low oxygen levels, improper ventilator settings, drug treatments themselves, and/or all of these things combined? Yeah

Endothelial cells are more vulnerable to dying in people with preexisting endothelial dysfunction, which is more often associated with being a male, being a smoker, having high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity. Blood clots can form and/or travel to other parts of the body. When blood clots travel to the toes, and cause blockages in blood flow there, meaning ischemia or infarction, that can cause gangrene there. And lots of times patients with gangrene require amputation, and ďCOVID toesĒ

So is antiphospholipid antibody syndrome (APS), the cause of all these blood clots in patients with severe COVID? Maybe. Some patients with APS have whatís called catastrophic APS, where these patients can have strokes, seizures, heart attacks, kidney failure, ARDS, skin changes like the ones I mentioned. Viral infectious diseases, particularly those of the respiratory tract, have been reported as being the triggers for CAPS. The pathogenesis is complex and may involve the activation of Toll-like receptor 4 (TLR-4), which triggers a cytokine storm, followed by alterations to the endothelium of lung capillaries, which serves as the trigger for inducing the clotting storm.

Various factors increase the risk of developing arterial thrombosis. Classically, the cardiovascular-dependent risk factors implicated in clotting have been hypertension, meaning high blood pressure, high levels of cholesterol, smoking, diabetes, age, chemotherapy, and degree of infection. All of these contribute toward developing arterial thrombosis.

A lot of patients with severe COVID-19 have certain labs that resemble DIC, such as increased PT/INR, increased PTT, decreased levels of platelets. But the reason why these COVID patients who developed clots in the study I mentioned earlier, the reason why they donít have DIC, is actually 2 reasons, one, they werenít having extensive bleeding, and two, they did not have low fibrinogen levels. And if its truly DIC, you would have both of those things.

Anyway, you can probably glean from this video why its so hard for doctors to figure out what is going on with this virus. Between the variable ways this disease can present in different patients, and the different ways that organs can suffer damage, yeah, this is really, really really, complicated.

Wednesday, 6 May 2020 at 14h 15m 13s

Sobering Information

From Laurie Garrett, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who wrote "Ebola: story of an outbreak."

As President Trump starts to reopen the country, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Laurie Garrett predicts the pandemic will last at least 36 months. Meanwhile, a top government vaccine specialist says he was forced from his job after he resisted the administrationís promotion of untested treatments for COVID-19. Garrett predicted the pandemic. In an extended interview, she discusses whatís next.

Wednesday, 6 May 2020 at 9h 56m 16s

A map of COVID cases in SF

Here is the map of where I live, San Francisco. My district is in the 5 to 10 cases per 10,000 residents right now. Notice how every district of the city has cases.

Click here for a great info-graphic/story from the New York Times about the number of excess deaths currently in each state of the United States. Not every state has a high rate of excess deaths, and some states have below the average deaths during the same time period -- January to April.

California is one of the states that has a lot of excess deaths. A total of 1,100 excess deaths. Here is what the graph of California looks like

Is anyone interested in trying to grasp how the stock market can be increasing even though the economy has hit the skids and the unofficial unemployment rate nears 20%? Here is a good article in morningstar.

While most businesses are at best struggling, a happy few are booming. This fact is not only reflected in the performance gap between the large- and small-company indexes, but also by the disparity in fortunes between public and private companies. Because publicly traded firms operate nationally (if not internationally), they tend to be technologically capable and therefore positioned to compete during social distancing. Local businesses, in contrast, are likelier to be brick-and-mortar affairs that are hampered by movement restrictions.

In other words, that millions of workers have been released by local businesses--or national firms in industries that have been devastated, such as airlines and hotels--is relatively immaterial to the stock marketís leaders. As long the layoffs donít lead to a ripple effect, wherein the broader economic woes affect their revenues, their stocks quite logically can rise even as other businesses fall.

This is confirmed deaths, not cdc calculations to try and estimate the under-counted deaths. That's called hard data.

It looks like we've had roughly the same number of confirmed deaths from COVID in two months than ALL the flu deaths COMBINED over the last 7 years.

And we are only in the first 15 minutes of a two hour film.

Tuesday, 5 May 2020 at 15h 29m 0s

Another view of Planet of the Humans

This is from Just Have A Think, put together by a British fellow whose name escapes, but offers quite insightful and scientifically profound videos on the latest science and technology. So what does he think about the recent "Planet of the Humans" film?

On the 50th Anniversary of the first ever Earth Day, Jeff Gibbs and Michael Moore released a documentary film free on You Tube. The film is called Planet of the Humans, and it proved quite popular. This week we review the movie and consider its implications for climate activism.

Tuesday, 5 May 2020 at 15h 24m 13s

Irrationality

Today a man from near Springfield, Illinois called in on the Thom Hartmann show near the end of the show, who was offended because Thom brought up that a lot of (if not all) of the anti-shutdown protests are being sponsored/assisted by right-wing billionaire backed groups -- AND are also bringing out people wearing Nazi symbols.

The caller was only upset about feeling like he was called a Nazi because he supported Trump.

Thom allowed the man a lot of liberty to speak, but the man had no rebuttal when Thom asked him why he isn't doing anything about the Nazi's in his party if he is so offended at feeling like he was called a Nazi. To which the man said (NOTE: I have to paraphrase because I heard this more than 3 hours ago, and there is no recording I can refer to)--

Caller:"Well, all I heard was that I was being called a Nazi. I don't know anyone around here who supports Nazi's and I know a lot of Trump supporters."

Thom: "Well then why don't you do something about getting rid of the Nazi's in your party. Why don't you do like Justin Amash in Michigan who is running as a Libertarian. Or do what Jeff Flake in Arizona did, refuse to join the party until the support for Nazi's are removed. There is a place for principle'd conservatism. Why do you want to be in a party that support's Nazi's?"

Caller:"Well I am a principle'd conservative. But I just don't like being called a Nazi just because I support Donald Trump."

Thom: "But Trump is supporting them. He calls them Very Fine People. He did that at Chancellorville, and also recently when he referred to the Nazi's in Lansing as Fine People."

Caller:"Well, I haven't heard about that."

Thom: "Go read his tweets. It's not just once. It's all the time. What is it that Trump says that you support? What does he say that you like?

The conversation continued for another minute, but that last statement is what struck me.

I'll try and add more to this post later. I want to elaborate on the abject irrationality of that last statement, because everything Trump and his minions have done has effectively been a slow destruction of both the social fabric (remember the NFL players taking a knee) and the federal system of government (like prioritizing ending epa rules for polluters and car emissions as the first order of decisions during a pandemic). I don't think that actually puts "America First" but the power of the meme is so strong that this caller from Illinois uses it to cloak his inability to see that Trump is inciting National Socialist extremists to "liberate" states from public health decisions made in order to manage the effects and spread of a pandemic.